Published Date: July 21, 2019 . Last Updated April 23, 2021
Gone are the days when CPAs had to work through a stash of paper to get things done. With the marvels of electronic and digital transformation, now every accountant and bookkeeper even those operating out of a brick and mortar office are laced with technology or digital transformation.
Today, a lot of CPAs are operating through online bookkeeping and tax preparation firms. They have streamlined their services in many different ways to offer the best customer experience that any accounting client can ever live through.
In this piece, we are going to discuss some of the major elements of technologies that have changed how online accounting and bookkeeping firms work in this day and age.
1) Cloud Storage and Computing
The concept of cloud storage has completely turned around the online accounting practices. Accountants are no longer dependent on the client’s correspondence to take care of daily books. With portals having centralized cloud storage, a client and a bookkeeping professional can seamlessly work on a single document while sitting on two different ends of the world.
Moreover, cloud storage can also be used for the transaction of sensitive financial information through read-only files.
2) Digitization and Paperless Accounting Practice
The fact that accounting and other financial services are denoted through the word ‘book’ tells us how central the paper was once in that overall process. Digitization has knocked out the paper from the online accounting and bookkeeping services. From online payroll to tax filing, everything has gone paperless.
The departure of paper from accounting and bookkeeping practices has redefined what convenience now means in the sector. This is the reason why many redefined cpa boast about the ‘paperless’ nature of their work.
3) E-Signatures
For a long time, the non-availability of options to get authorization on a document affected the digital correspondences in the financial sector. However, this constraint has also been ruled out with the advent of e-signature. Now clients can sign and give their formal approval for any financial task and documentation while sitting anywhere in the world.
The federal laws consider e-signature as a legitimate means to sign documents. Many online accountants offer this service to their clients through the online accounting firm portal.
My CPA Dashboard is an online portal where all these technological improvements and digital transformation parts are packed into a single window to streamline CPA practices. It’s a complete Customer Relationship Management (CRM) suite for CPAs serving small businesses.